1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improved stethoscope design with an extended detection range, extended frequency bandwidth, which may be used with an artificial intelligence connection to other clinical data for analysis.
2) Description of Related Art
The human ability to sense sound is the result of an approximately four billion year evolutionary cycle. Hearing enables a listener to hear/perceive natural sounds that exist in the environment, which aids with locating food, as well as helps the listener avoid becoming food. The human ear responds to disturbances/temporal variations in pressure and is very sensitive. The ear has: more than six (6) orders of magnitude in dynamic range of pressure sensitivity; twelve (12) orders of magnitude in sound intensity; and three (3) orders of magnitude in frequency (20 Hz-20 KHz). Further, having two ears greatly enhances 3-D localization of sounds, and also the determination of pitch (i.e. frequency resolution). This may extend into the megahertz range as well.
As social animals, human hearing has developed to improve detection of human-made sounds. Social animals are primarily interested in their own species, and, hence, humans are primarily interested in hearing human-made sounds produced by voices. The frequency range of sounds produced by voices—the totality of the physics associated with air as a medium plus vibrating vocal chords in our larynx/voice box plus hyoid bone plus acoustic cavities of our lungs plus throat plus mouth plus nasal passage/sinus cavity dictates what the acoustic power spectrum of the human voice can/cannot be. Over the course of time, hearing co-evolved with the sounds that voices make. Further, human hearing has evolved to possess a limited range in order to avoid hypersensitivity to sounds, such as, for example, infra-sound (f<20 Hz). It would be significantly detrimental if human hearing was constantly being “masked” by hearing draft/wind noises as one walked or ran.
One particular use of human hearing is to diagnose health by listening to noises made by the human body, such as by use of a stethoscope. Stethoscopes date back to Rene Laennec, a personal physician of Napoleon, who invented the stethoscope in 1815. That device picked up acoustic vibrations, such as heart and breathing sounds from the body surface and transmitted them via a conductive, air-filled medium, which is typically a pipe or a rubber hose. This style of stethoscope remains in use today because of its simplicity and robustness. For over 200 years the stethoscope has been used by healthcare providers to listen to a variety of body systems such as the heart, lungs, blood vessels, and gastrointestinal tract for sounds that aid in the diagnosis and clinical management of patients.
A typical stethoscope consists of a diaphragm or bell that is placed on the body surface of the patient and tubing that transmits the body sounds to the examiner's ears for interpretation. Only sounds loud enough and within the frequency of the hearing range of the listener can be heard and interpreted for assessing the health of the patient. More recently, electronic stethoscopes have been introduced that can amplify body sounds and also record and graphically display the frequency of the sounds in real time. However, to date, only frequencies within the human hearing range have been systematically evaluated.
It has been reported that healthcare practitioners experience difficulties listening and identifying heart sounds with a stethoscope, especially in a working medical facility filled with a plethora of background noise. Accordingly, it is an object of the present disclosure to assist in learning and accurately identifying heart and other body sounds, as well as new sounds that will help with patient diagnosis and medical treatment. What is needed in the art is an improved stethoscope design. Information from the stethoscope of the current disclosure may be used in combination with other patient data and assessed by artificial intelligence and deep learning to enhance the accuracy of diagnoses and create a personalized patient profile. The device can be used in medical research to assess the effectiveness of treatment such as that of new medications since it will be able to provide earlier and more sensitive detection of progression or regression of disease. This extended analysis of body sounds can also be used as an educational tool in the health sciences.